...I felt him in dreams...
Even before the Archmage spoke again, she knew what he was going to say.
“Suraklin had worked for a long time on the notion of taking over the minds of others,” the old man said. “With his slaves, of course, he controlled their minds with his own; those under his influence did as he bade them and were his eyes and ears, without thinking to ask why, and his influence was incredibly strong. That is why I said I am glad to see you still capable of leaving Antryg’s side. But he wanted more than that.” The old man sighed, his thin mouth taut and rather white, as if sickened by some unshared knowledge whose bare bones only he would reveal, not out of secretiveness, but out of mercy. “He took the boy Antryg, the most powerful child adept he could find. He taught him everything he himself knew, like a man furnishing a house with his own things....”
“No!” Joanna pulled her mind from the hideous picture that swam there unbidden of a gawky, thin-faced, frightened boy staring with hypnotized gray eyes into the terrible yellow gaze of the old man. Intellectually she knew that she had never truly known Antryg. Why did it cross her mind that the nervous, gentle man, the man who had whispered, “I will not do this...” and turned away, rather than take her in his arms when she could not have afforded to say no, even had she not consented, had been in fact that boy and not the mage who had raped him of mind and body so that he could go on living in his stead. “Oh, Christ, no.”
“I’m sorry,” the wizard said softly.
She pressed her hands to her mouth, suddenly trembling, remembering the soft force of Antryg’s lips on hers. It was Suraklin who had kissed her, an ancient intelligence in stolen flesh. She thought how close she’d come to lying with him on the road from Kymil to Angelshand and felt almost ill.
Slim and strong, the hand of the Archmage rested upon her arm. “When Caris told me you were with him, I was afraid. I know how strong a hold Suraklin could take, even over those he did not fully possess,” He glanced back toward the irregular roofline of the Summer Palace, visible over the sun-spangled trees. “I fear he has the Prince’s trust already; he will consolidate that hold in whatever way he can.”
Sick with disgust, she recalled the mage’s mock flirtation with Pharos; a game, she could have swom at the time. But then, she could have sworn that Antryg’s care for her was genuine and not simply the means to some other end.
“Antryg said...” She hesitated. It was not, she knew now, Antryg who had spoken. “He said he had loved Suraklin. Was that true?”
“That Antryg loved him?” Salteris nodded. “Yes, very probably. Suraklin had that talent of winning the hearts of those who came in contact with him. Their loyalty to him was unquestioning, almost fanatical, even in the face of evidence that he was not what he said he was.”
Joanna blushed, not, she knew, because she had trusted Antryg, but because there was some large portion of her which cared for him still—or, she thought, confused, cared for the man who’d sat by her in the roadside inns and who’d talked with her on those long, weary afternoons on the road about television and computers and friends he’d met during the Mellidane Revolts, the man who’d stood so close to her in the dimness of the drawing room at Devilsgate. Why did she feel it was so absolutely impossible that that man was the Dark Mage?
His voice quiet in the gloom of the arbor, Salteris went on. “That was the thing I never understood, after I found Antryg in the monastery, years after the destruction of Suraklin’s citadel—his story that he had fled shortly before the Imperial armies gathered. But I thought...” He sighed again and shook his head.
“Twenty-five years ago,” Joanna said suddenly.
“What?” The Archmage raised his head sharply, an amber glint flickering in the onyx depths of his eyes.
“Antryg said he—he had to ask some member of the Council about something that happened twenty-five years ago.”
“So.” The old man nodded. “He feared someone else might have seen or known or guessed. And if he found them, if he learned that anyone had seen Antryg make a final visit to Suraklin before the execution...” The dark eyes narrowed. “And did he?”
Joanna shook her head. “He never found another member of the Council-—or at least, not that I knew of. Pharos told him that his father had seen something or knew something after the taking of Kymil that changed him; and that seemed to horrify Antryg. But later...” She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”
“If I were trying to bring the mad Prince under my influence,” Caris sniffed, “and learned his father knew anything, had any suspicion which he might have passed along, I’d be horrified, too.”
“Maybe,” Joanna said slowly. “He did say the Emperor never liked him. Somebody—I forget who—told me the Emperor visited Suraklin several times during his trial. Do you think he could have recognized him in Antryg? Or suspected, at least? Because he did sentence him to death seven years ago.”
The old man sighed bitterly. “And I, to my sorrow, had the sentence commuted. But as Archmage of the Council, I could not permit the Emperor, the Church, or anyone else to hold the power of life and death over any Council mage, be he never so forsworn of his vows. At the time, I believed that that was all there was.” He frowned into the distance again, all the parallel lines of that high forehead seeming to echo and re-echo his speculations and his grief. “Hieraldus was a brilliant man and a perceptive one. He would have felt the similarity. So did I, once or twice, at first. But I put it down to the fact that for many years the boy Antryg had been virtually Suraklin’s slave. After that...” He shook his head, and a stray fragment of sunlight turned the edge of his long hair to blazing silver against the black of his robe. “Perhaps elements of Antryg’s original personality survived—enough to keep those who knew him from suspecting the change. No one but Suraklin had really known him well—and then, of course, he was always known to be mad.”
“Useful,” Caris sneered.
Joanna remembered the shadows of the roadhouse hearth and Antryg’s lazy smile over the tankard of beer. I never knew him, she thought. I only knew the lie. Why do I grieve for the lie?
“Was he?” she asked. “Mad, I mean.”
“The original Antryg?” Salteris shrugged. “Who knows? He may have become unbalanced by the struggle against Suraklin’s will. Afterward, the reputation was Suraklin’s shield and cloak, an armor fashioned to resemble vulnerability. I pitied him, but never suspected—until he struck.” The old man’s mouth tightened again, all the delicate muscle of cheek and jaw springing into prominence under the silky cloak of white hair. She understood then that hers had not been the only trust, the only love, betrayed.
“Where is he?” Caris’ eyes sought the clustering turrets of the Summer Palace.
“I left him in the attics of the old wing.” She looked down at her hands, folded among the silly profusion of ruffle and lace in her lap. “He—He and I looked over Narwahl Skipfrag’s equipment. I don’t suppose I told him anything he didn’t already know. He’s going to program a computer to do magic. With a big enough computer, the scope of the subroutines would be infinite. I think...”
She hesitated, then went on, ashamed at how nearly she’d fallen for something that now seemed so obvious. “I think the scenario he planned to use was that some other evil wizard—the one he said had kidnapped you and me and tried to murder the Regent and all the rest of it—was doing it, so why didn’t I help him steal equipment and work out programs as a countermeasure. At least that would be the logical course of action. He was working up to it very gradually, winning my trust....” She swallowed, her throat hurting again at the loss of that gentle consideration with which he had, she now knew, baited his trap. “If I hadn’t guessed, I probably would have done it.”
Cool and very strong, Salteris’ thin hands closed over hers. “It is perilously easy to come to care for one upon whom one is utterly dependent,” he said. “Particularly if he has gotten you out of danger—which he did, didn’t he?”
The old man’s voice was like a gentle astringent. “He miscalculated your strength, child, and your wits—but it is as well you left him when you did. Because he would not have stopped with simply winning your...”
He paused, and Joanna finished for him cynically, “Heart?”
“Confidence, I was going to say. He could have gone into your mind—you would have let him—and used your knowledge of—computers?” He pronounced the alien word hesitantly.
Joanna nodded. “Not only computers—systems and program design. That’s my job. It’s what I do.”
“He could have used your brain, your knowledge, like a tool, even as he could have used your body.”
She glanced up quickly at that, sensing different meanings behind the phrase, but Salteris’ dark gaze was already fixed again on the distant vista of parterre and statues and on the far-off glint of the roofs of the Imperial Palace, which rose like a mellow sandstone cliff beyond the trees.
“As he used me,” he murmured. “I was the one who originally told him of Narwahl’s experiments with the teles, little suspecting that the dozen or so teles never found of Suraklin’s hoard had been hidden away by him.” He shut his eyes for a moment, bitter grief deepening the lines already graven in the soft flesh of the lids. “Narwahl was my friend,” he added in a voice barely to be heard. “It seems that in striving after justice, I have done naught but ill.” The narrow, sensitive mouth quirked, and he glanced beside him at Joanna again, the bitterness of wormwood in those deep eyes. “Like you, I have been victim to that accursed charm.”
She put her hand over his, feeling the warm flesh, thin as silk over the knobby shapes of knuckles and tendon. Archmage though he was, she felt in him suddenly only an old man who knew himself responsible for his dear friend’s murder. She hoped he knew nothing of the blood-splattered attic with its tiny shards of glass; but she also knew that the hope was impossible, since he was the Archmage.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and some of the bleak horror faded from the old man’s eyes.
“We have both been his dupes,” he said gently.
Joanna shook her head. “All I’ve lost is some illusions,” she replied. “Not—not anyone I know.” Only someone I hoped to know. And the hope, she reflected wryly, was my problem.
His fingers tightened over hers, remarkably strong for so old a man’s. “Come,” he said and rose to his feet, the long, dark robe falling straight about him. “It’s best we find him, before he learns that I’ve escaped and am here.”
The Summer Palace was curiously quiet as they approached it; the Regent’s high, harsh voice was audible from the terrace, but his words were indistinct with distance. Like three ghosts, they moved through the shrubbery, which, in accordance with the Prince’s Gothic tastes and desire for privacy, grew closer around the walls than the formal vistas of topiary, which surrounded the new Palace. Away from the graceful symmetry of its remodeled facade, all pretense of the building’s modernity faded. The stable and kitchen courts were even to Joanna’s untrained eye a jumble of styles and periods, mansard roofs crowding comfortably shoulder to shoulder with the oddly angled gambrels and projecting upper storeys of the Palace’s earlier incarnations. “Won’t someone ask us what we’re doing here?” she inquired, glancing uncertainly at Caris’ dark uniform and sword and at the old man’s flowing dark robes.
They paused in the gloom of a grove of cypresses opposite the round, gray turret of the stable tower. Through the tower’s broad gate the stable court was visible; grooms in the Prince’s flame-colored livery were working with neat efficiency to harness a pair of coal-black horses to a light carriage of some kind. At Joanna’s side, Salteris murmured, “I scarcely think so,” and made a small gesture with one hand.
The nearer of the two horses, which had been standing quietly up until that instant; flung up its head in panic. A stable boy caught too late at the bridle, and the beast reared, frightening its harness-mate. Men began to run from all directions under the shouted orders of the gray-haired coachman in his gold-and-crimson braid. “Stay close to me,” the wizard admonished. With Caris glancing watchfully in all directions and Joanna holding up the voluminous handfuls of her beruffled skirts, they calmly crossed the drive and passed unseen by the shouting confusion around the carriage.
“It’s always easier to enter a house through the servants’ quarters,” the old man said softly, “provided you know what you’re doing.” The oppressive heat of steam and the damp smells of soap and linen enveloped them as they passed into the shadows of the brick laundries on the far side of the court. Salteris turned unerringly along a brick-paved corridor with a low, groined wooden ceiling, under which the day’s heat collected with the mingled smells of smoke, cooking meat, and spices from the kitchens beyond. A man started to emerge from an archway of reflected daylight to their right. Joanna, startled, paused in her stride, but the old man beside her only flicked a finger; from the room beyond came a crashing noise that made the servant turn hastily back, yelling “Not that way, you stupid jolterhead!”
Something stirred in Joanna’s consciousness. A dark, cold feeling of half-familiar strangeness, like an unheard sound, seemed to go through her, and she was aware of the sudden hiss of Caris’ breath beside her. Salteris checked his steps in the narrow seam of the kitchen passage, his dark eyes narrowing and a flame seeming to spark suddenly in their depths....
Joanna identified where she’d first felt that queer, haunted sense of terror a split-instant before Caris and his grandfather’s glances met.
Then they all began to run.
There was a backstairs at the end of the corridor, leading to apartments in the old wing. Salteris, dark robe billowing about his thin limbs, led them unerringly to it, across an unused state chamber with its ancient linenfold and gilded coffer and up the stairs to the attic; Joanna followed in a susurrus of silk taffeta. The memory of the blood-splattered attic in Narwahl’s house and of Minhyrdin the Fair mumbling, He’d call them up, spirits, elementals leaped to her mind. Panic chilled her heart as she realized that Antryg had electrical equipment at his disposal.
But when they burst past the startled guard into that vast room, nothing met their eyes—nothing, hanging dark and shimmering where the sunlight had been, as if a hole had been opened in the fabric of the world and the night, momentarily, allowed to breathe through. It grew smaller and smaller, like a shrinking bubble of darkness, even as they watched, seeming to retreat without ever reaching the far wall. Along it, Joanna thought she could see something moving.
Salteris strode forward and Joanna reached involuntarily to catch the black fabric of his sleeve. The smells of woodsmoke and herbs came to her from it as he turned, as they had come from Antryg’s—the smells of wizardry that had smothered her at San Serano, with die strangler’s grip around her throat. She gasped, “Don’t...!”
At the same moment, Caris shoved her roughly aside, his sword whining from its sheath. “We’ll lose him!” The wind of the Void lifted his blond hair back from his forehead, and anger blazed in his eyes. For a terrifying instant, Joanna saw that her choice was either to fling herself willy-nilly after them into whatever second gap in the Void Salteris should open or to be trapped in this world, with neither good mages nor evil to help her, forever....
She gritted her teeth and tightened her grip on her gathered-up petticoats, ready to run. But Salteris did not move. He only stood watching as the hideous black shimmer of the Void faded and vanished.
“No,” he said. His voice echoed queerly in that enormous room, with its jumble of antique furniture and the sun glinting harshly on the glass tubes and copper wires
coiled beneath the window. He turned back to consider them—Joanna in her ruffled and borrowed gown, and Caris with his sword half-drawn, his eyes the eyes of a hawk stooping to its prey. “No. I know where he has gone, my children. I read the marks of Suraklin that guide him like candles through the darkness.” As if he guessed her fears from her grim eyes and braced chin, he smiled and, reaching out, gently touched Joanna’s cheek. “I will not leave you alone here, child. Indeed,” he added quietly, “when I cross the Void to trap him, I shall need you both.”
Chapter XVIII
WHEN THEY REACHED GARY’S house in Agoura, they found it empty and silent. Just as well, thought Joanna, watching Caris make a rapid, wary circuit of the den, kitchen, and party room, naked sword blade in hand. The last thing she wanted at the moment was even to see Gary, let alone explain to him where she’d been for the last two weeks and who Caris and the Archmage were.
Letting herself in with the hideaway key, she had a strange sense of déjà vu, like the dreams she occasionally had of being in grade school again with her adult knowledge and experience. Some of it was simply aesthetic—her eye, used for weeks to rococo curves and molded plaster ceilings, found the high tech starkness of the place alien and strange, and her lungs gagged on the quality of the September air. But it was emotional as well—a sense of reality-poisoning that was increased by the impersonality of the house, the party room with its ugly, comfortless couches and prominent television set. Everything around her seemed almost audibly to speak Gary’s name.
For no reason, she remember the ragged little mill girls in Kymil, hastening through the silent glory of late summer dawn, and the bitter, weary pity on Antryg’s face as he’d asked, “Is it worth it?”
“It’s all dead,” Caris said softly. He came back from the big glass-and-chrome kitchen, sword still in hand, cautiously touching television, bar, and couches in passing. “I mean—it never was alive.” He paused, his dark, beautifully shaped brows drawn down over his eyes with puzzlement as he looked at Joanna. “What is it all made of?”
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